


A Type of Heaven

by nothingeverlost



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Stargate Universe
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, F/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-09
Updated: 2012-08-09
Packaged: 2017-11-11 18:20:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/481470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingeverlost/pseuds/nothingeverlost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Tell me she’s fine,” he growls, a step away from grabbing Greer and shoving him against the wall, the gun he’s holding be damned.  “Look me in the face and tell me she’s fine, and I’ll go see Young right now.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Type of Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> A post-ep for ‘Space’ in an AU universe in which Belle is on Destiny. For Bad-faery, because I’m only posting because she said to. I’m way nervous about this thing. Honest crit is appreciated.

_“Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.” -Tryon Edwards_

II

“How is she?” They’re in no-man’s land between one ship and the other, with nothing to do except hope that neither side shoots them down, when Rush finally speaks. Until now all he’s done is issue orders.

“She slapped Colonel Young, in the gate room when he tried to explain why you weren’t there.” There’s no reason to ask who he’s talking about. Everyone on the ship knows that there’s only two things Rush cares about, and he’s not asking about Destiny.

“And since then?” The corner of his lip curls up a little, in a smile that’s at least part snarl. He would have liked seeing that, both the fierceness in the eyes of a woman usually so sweet and the expression on Young’s face.

“I don’t know. I haven’t really seen her since then. She kind of keeps to herself.” Chloe shakes her head, frowning a little.

“Did Young...”

“He had TJ take her to her quarters. He wasn’t mad.” She’s quick to reassure him. She even reaches out as if to touch him, but thinks better of it. 

“He sure the hell better not have been.” The man deserves everything that’s coming to him, and that’s far more than a slap.

“She’ll be glad to see you.” Chloe speaks more to herself as him. Rush figures she’s thinking of Scott as much as Belle. Her soldier boy’s only had a couple of days of uncertainty, though, while Belle has no reason to expect his return.

“Here’s hoping no one decides to shoot first and ask questions later.” He doesn’t speak again until they’re docking alongside Destiny. He’s home, or at least as close to home as he’s had since Gloria died. He helps Chloe down first, his own inelegant leap coming next. 

It’s not until he’s stumbling against the wall that he realizes how weak his muscles are. Floating unconscious in liquid is not the best way to keep muscle toned, and their escape has taken almost everything from him. That doesn’t keep him from getting up again, stumbling past Chloe being held tightly by one of the two men on board that are in love with her.

“Young’s gonna want to talk to you.” Greer tries to stop him, but short of a bullet nothing’s going to keep him from making his way to Belle’s quarters.

“He can wait until I’m ready to talk to him. I’m off duty.” The son of a bitch can wait. He’s not the one that matters right now.

“Rush...”

“Tell me she’s fine,” he growls, a step away from grabbing Greer and shoving him against the wall, the gun he’s holding be damned. “Look me in the face and tell me she’s fine, and I’ll go see Young right now.”

He almost wishes Greer could say yes. It would be worth having to face the man that tried to kill him if it meant Belle hasn’t been suffering. Greer is uncharacteristically quiet.

“Fuck.” This time when he leaves no one tries to stop him.

He looks for her in her sleeping quarters first. It’s the middle of the day, or at least what passes for day according the the schedule Young has set for everyone, but he knows that it’s her most common retreat when she doesn’t know what to do with herself. It’s empty. So is the hydroponics lab, the showers, and the observation deck. The console room isn’t, but there’s not Belle and he doesn’t give a damn how many times Brody calls out to him, he’s not wasting the time or energy communicating with the man. Later he’ll have to make up some lie about why he’s not dead, but he needs to see where he stands with Young first.

The suit the aliens forced his unconscious body into is tight and chafing. His muscles are starting to shake from exhaustion and he has to admit, after one more look in Belle’s quarters, that he’s at a loss. There doesn’t seem to be anything to do but head for his own bed and hope that by the time he’s woken up she’s easier to find.

The door to his room slides open with the familiar hiss of decompression. It’s not home, he spends far more time in the console room, but at least it’s familiar. No one’s tried to claim it in the time he’s been gone. His tedious book is on the table beside the bed, along with one of his notebooks. The bed’s just as disheveled as it was the last time he slept on it; it’s a waste of time to make the bed if he’s just going to sleep in it again. There’s also the perverse pleasure to disobeying Young’s tenants about military order.

Everything’s as it should be, except it’s not. The moment he steps into the room his senses are twitching. It’s dark, and it’s not until he switches on the light that he sees it. Sees _her._

“Belle?” She’s not much more than a shadow, curled under his bed, but he’s stared at the back of her head enough to know those brown curls. The only other thing he can see is a hand, a little hand that he’s watched gently transplant a root system, or gather berries while planet-side, or hold a book a little too close to her face. He knew those hands. “Belle, can you come out of there?”

“This area is off limits. You’re not allowed.” Her voice is only just loud enough to reach him, and scratchy from disuse or a need for something to drink. Possibly both. 

“This is my room. I’m allowed.” He crouches next to the bed, head craned to get a better look. At the movement she twists deeper into the shadows, but not before he notices that she’s wearing his waistcoat over her dress. “It’s me, Belle. It’s Nick.”

“No.” A small fist hits the underside of the bed, making a dull thunking sound. “No, I won’t do this again. Nick’s not here, he’s gone, and I’m not mad. She tried to make me believe I was, but I’m stronger than that. Stronger than her.”

“You’re one of the only completely sane people on this ship.” He huffs a little, not sure which side of the line he stands himself. He’s certainly not normal, but standard definitions of normality haven’t interested him in years, not since Gloria. “The Colonel lied, Belle. He left me for dead, but he didn’t stay long enough to see if I actually died or not. You know I’m too much of a stubborn bastard to let him get the drop on me permanently.”

“We jumped into FTL.” It’s a whisper, but it doesn’t carry quite as much doubt and desperation.

“I hitched a ride with some not so obliging aliens. What they lacked in hospitality they made up for in a single minded determination to catch up to this ship. Look at me Belle.” It’s an effort not to reach out and touch her, but he’s not taking more than she’s ready to give. Despite what some people think he can be patient; he just usually doesn’t waste the skill on human interactions. Equations are generally more deserving of his attention, but in the last decade only the secret of the ninth chevron has intrigued him like she has.

“It hurts, Nick.” She turns, and for the first time he can see her face, achingly familiar and more interesting than anything else in the room. He can’t see her eyes, though, and he needs to even if it means seeing her pain as well.

“I swear I’ll be here when you look at me. I drilled a hole in the side of Destiny to get back, Belle. All you have to do is give me one second and I’ll prove that it’s me.” If logic doesn’t work he really will touch her. Hell, he’ll drag her out if he needs to, but he hopes it doesn’t have to go that far. 

Belle loves light and open places, but he knows that it’s the cramped and dark places she seeks when she’s tired, nervous, scared, or sad. Maybe someday he’ll understand why. Maybe someday she’ll seek out him inside of a hidey-hole under a bed, or inside a storage closet like the one where he found her after the ship didn’t burn up inside a star. “Open those blue eyes of yours, Belle. If I’m not really here then you can slap me twice as hard as you slapped Young.”

“He came back without you.”

Nick has just enough time to appreciate that she refers to him directly rather than in the third person before she’s looking at him, eyes unblinking but still not as sharp and focused as he’s used to. “Nick?”

“You didn’t think you were getting rid of me, did you? I believe I have a thorn in your side reputation to uphold.” He’s half under the bed himself, trying to get a closer look at her. His biggest regrets, as he’d faded in and out of consciousness in that observation tank, was not learning more about Destiny and not learning more about her. Her touch, for one, on more than his shoulder or hand. Her taste, for another. But most of all her secrets.

“I’m not crazy.” Her hand hovers, just above his, as if she’s scared to prove herself wrong. he watches as she nibbles her lower lip and mutters something he can’t quite make out about ‘brave’ and ‘follow.’ After a minute her hand settles on his. It’s warm, like nothing has been since the desert sun, planetside. It’s soft, like nothing else he can think of but her own touch, before he’d left on his mission. “You’re real.”

“And alive,” he adds with a snort. It’s been a close thing, quite a few times since he’s seen her, but he’s here now. She, however, doesn’t seem to share his sense of humor. She closes her eyes, but in the moment before she does he can see tears gathered there. Damn it, the last thing he wants is to hurt her. “Belle?”

“You’re real. You’re alive.” She whispers, not speaking to him. It’s more like a mantra. Or talking to someone who wasn’t there. There’s times he’s able to forget she’s a widow as much as he’s a widower. Being reminded right now is like a punch to the gut. He hates the man that had Belle first. The man that got to see her someplace other than a ship under constant assault and near death experiences. She is meant for sunshine and gardens, not hydroponics labs and fluorescent lighting.

“We’re both alive. And at least one of us is exhausted; any chance we can get in the bed instead of under it?” His voice is gruff, his patience slipping against his will. The damn suit chafes and he needs, if possible, to touch more than her hand. He also needs sleep but he plans on fighting that off as long as possible.

“Oh Nick, I’m so sorry.” She moves so fast she bumps into him. He catches her with an arm around her waist, the length of her body against his but almost all touch blocked by the artificial materials of the suit.

“Don’t. There’s no sorry, not tonight.” None of this is her fault. Some of it is his, but he’s not offering any apologies tonight either. 

He slides out from under the bed, swearing under his breath when he has to use his hand against the mattress to stand up. It’s a good thing that it doesn’t even occur to him to offer her help; he’d never succeed. He barely makes it to the closet without making a fool of himself. Thankfully his shirts are hung up, his jeans folded on the shelf, just as he left them.

“I’m getting changed,” he cautions, though it should be obvious. It takes longer than he’d like to figure out the catch on the suit; his mind is foggy and fingers filled with lead, making it a difficult task. Finally, though, he’s able to push the thing down to his waist and pull on his shirt. He could use a shower, but that’s going to have to wait.

“I can go, if you’d rather. I didn’t mean to take over anything. I haven’t been spending all of my time here, it just felt better in the afternoons when we should have been working together.” Her voice sounds more hollow; he hopes it’s just because she’s facing a wall.

“No.” Ten minutes, perhaps, and it’s not enough. Not after searching the ship for her, and spending days not thinking he’d ever see her again. “Stay. Please,” he adds reluctantly. Asking doesn’t come easy for him.

“I’m done with my tasks for today. I don’t have to go anywhere.” Her tasks. It makes him feel better to know that she’d still been doing the things that needed to get done. When he found her under the bed he’d feared the worst, that she’d been hiding for days and would have gone on hiding if he hadn’t returned.

“You’ll stay.” He lets out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding, a weight off his shoulders.

“As long as you want me.”

It’s on the tip of his tongue to say that he’ll always want her, but that’s a conversation for some far-off day, not when they’re still flirting with not-really-dead and something-more-than-friends. Instead he strips out of the rest of the suit, letting it fall the the floor; later he’ll worry about studying it closer. He pulls on his jeans and carefully makes it to the bed without his legs shaking too much.

“I might nap in a bit. You look tired.” That, and his hand tapping the mattress next to him, was as close to presumption as he got.

“I haven’t been sleeping well lately.” She slips onto the bed, accepting his unspoken invitation. She understands, perhaps, more than he does because she tucks her whole body against his, anchoring him as if her touch can keep away the nightmares he’s already dreading. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” he confesses. She’s the only one besides the ship itself that he had missed. Sure, Eli wasn’t a complete waste of space and he was glad he’d been able to take Chloe away from the fate that awaited her, but if he never saw anyone aboard the ship it wouldn’t be a great loss. Except her. It had been too easy, when he’d been gone, to pull an image of her face before his eyes, the shade of her hair and gleam in her eyes perfectly remembered. He spent more time than he should, thinking about her.

“Sleep, Nick.” Her hand cups his temple, fingers brushing his forehead. “I can hear your brain working still. There will be time for that tomorrow.”

“I’ll sleep if you will.” He wraps an arms around her after he roughly tugs up the blankets. His eyes seem to grow heavier with her order, damn them. He had more to say. “Belle...”

“Tomorrow, sweetheart. You can tell me anything you want tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he mutters just before sleep claims him. That he has a tomorrow is a miracle. That she’ll be in his tomorrow is an even bigger one.


End file.
